Tag Afghanistan

Entries 9 Total

Jason Burke’s Bin Laden obituary perpetuates myth that Taliban refused to hand Bin Laden over

May 2, ’11 11:13 AM

Jason Burke’s Osama bin Laden obit­u­ary for The Guard­ian per­petu­ates the myth that the Taliban never offered to hand Bin Laden over:

Faced with an ulti­matum, the Taliban again refused to sur­render Bin Laden, who ini­tially denied involve­ment, and an American-led aer­ial bomb­ing cam­paign followed.

In fact the Taliban pub­licly offered in Octo­ber of 2001 to hand Osama bin Laden over to a third coun­try, provided the U.S. hal­ted the illegal bomb­ing of Afgh­anistan and pro­duced the neces­sary evid­ence about involve­ment of Bin Laden or any of his asso­ci­ates in the 11 Septem­ber attacks. Would they have gone through with the offer? We’ll never know because Bush rejec­ted it, put­ting an end to any pos­sib­il­ity of a poten­tially peace­ful, legal res­ol­u­tion to the events of 11 Septem­ber 2001, and opened up the way for the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Afgh­anistan and Iraq, along with the mil­lions who have lost their lives or had them des­troyed as a result.

Update: Jason Burke says he’ll cor­rect obit­u­ary.

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Taliban Could Defeat NATO in 30 Days

Sep 19, ’10 7:51 PM

Mat­thew Nas­uti, for Kabul Press:

The para­dox for NATO and the Amer­ic­ans is that in Septem­ber, 2010, they will have deployed the largest num­ber of troops they ever had in Afgh­anistan, and yet that is when they are the most vul­ner­able, as the sup­ply needs for this huge force are poten­tially crippling.

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Hey hey Tony hey, how many kids have you killed today?

Sep 4, ’10 9:51 PM

Tony Blair has penned a six-page intro­duc­tion to the Amer­ican ver­sion of his blood money mem­oirs, in which he had this to say about recent U.S. presidents:

‘Mere mor­tals are still inspired by a cer­tain awe,’ he gushes.

Bill Clin­ton is ‘an extraordin­ary mix­ture of easy­going charm and fero­cious intel­lec­tual capa­city. Prob­ably … he is the most for­mid­able politi­cian I ever met.’ Pres­id­ent Bush ‘has great intu­ition.’ And of Barack Obama, he says: ‘The per­sonal char­ac­ter is clear: this is a man with steel in every part of him.’

Stay classy Blair.

Mean­while he’s been pel­ted with eggs and shoes at a book sign­ing in Ireland:

Skir­mishes broke out between pro­test­ers and police at the first pub­lic sign­ing for Tony Blair’s mem­oirs, with shoes and eggs hurled at the former prime minister.

Pro­test­ers shouted … “Hey hey Tony hey, how many kids have you killed today?”

“It really is shame­ful that some­body can be respons­ible for the death and destruc­tion that he was respons­ible for in Iraq and Afgh­anistan and walk away without any account­ing for that and become a very wealthy man off the back of it.”

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Actually Obama, America did seek war in Afghanistan

Dec 11, ’09 9:34 AM

Obama accept­ing his Nobel prize:

… per­haps the most pro­found issue sur­round­ing my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is wind­ing down. The other is a con­flict that Amer­ica did not seek …

Except that Amer­ica did seek armed con­flict with Afgh­anistan.

In Octo­ber of 2001 the Taliban pub­licly offered to hand Osama bin Laden over to a third coun­try, provided the U.S. hal­ted the illegal bomb­ing of Afgh­anistan and pro­duced the neces­sary evid­ence about involve­ment of bin Laden or any of his asso­ci­ates in the 11 Septem­ber attacks. Bush rejec­ted this, put­ting an end to any pos­sib­il­ity of a poten­tially peace­ful, legal res­ol­u­tion to the events of 11 Septem­ber 2001, and opened up the way for the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Afgh­anistan, Iraq and the threat of inva­sion of Iran, along with the mil­lions who have lost their lives or had them des­troyed as a result.

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Jacqui Janes is wrong about why her son is dead

Nov 10, ’09 8:37 PM

Jac­qui Janes believes her son is dead because the war in Afgh­anistan is under-resourced.

He’s not. He’s dead because he was fight­ing an unjust war.

The stated aim of the inva­sion of Afgh­anistan was to find Osama bin Laden and other high-ranking Al-Qaeda mem­bers. On 14 Octo­ber, 2001, the Taliban pub­licly offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to a third coun­try, provided the U.S. hal­ted the illegal bomb­ing of Afgh­anistan and pro­duced the neces­sary evid­ence about involve­ment of bin Laden or any of his asso­ci­ates in the 11 Septem­ber attacks.

George Bush junior dis­missed this offer and con­tin­ued with the offens­ive, put­ting an end to any pos­sib­il­ity of a poten­tially peace­ful, legal res­ol­u­tion to the events of 11 Septem­ber 2001.

The United Nations Secur­ity Coun­cil never author­ised the inva­sion of Afgh­anistan and it cer­tainly wasn’t an act of self-defence. It was an act of aggres­sion, the supreme inter­na­tional crime.

Neither George Bush nor Gor­don Brown had to go off to war, but Jac­qui Janes’ son did, and now he’s dead.

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Colonel Julian didn’t get the memo

Jul 20, ’09 8:09 AM

Ahh, yes, there’s noth­ing like a little Amer­ican excep­tion­al­ism to get one going in the morning.

Accord­ing to Reu­ters, Col­onel Greg Julian, a U.S. mil­it­ary spokes­man in Kabul, has been com­plain­ing that the Taliban is viol­at­ing inter­na­tional law by parad­ing a cap­tured U.S. sol­dier on camera.

It seems Col­onel Julian didn’t get the memo: the U.S. tore up inter­na­tional law a long time ago.

Not only did the U.S. com­mit the supreme war crime when it invaded Afgh­anistan and Iraq — supreme because of all that ensues from start­ing a war, includ­ing the crimes of your oppon­ents — but this is the same coun­try, of course, to have declared by pres­id­en­tial order that the Geneva Con­ven­tions did not apply to cap­tured Taliban sol­diers and has since been detain­ing Afghan pris­on­ers without trial, sneak­ing them off to Guantanamo and its secret pris­ons and tor­tur­ing them.

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No, Afghanistan is not “a war we should be fighting”

Jul 13, ’09 8:30 AM

Afgh­anistan is spun as a war we should be fight­ing.

In fact, a fact long for­got­ten by the West­ern media and oth­ers involved in the inva­sion of Afgh­anistan is that, on 14 Octo­ber, 2001, the Taliban pub­licly offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to a third coun­try, provided the U.S. hal­ted the illegal bomb­ing of Afgh­anistan and pro­duced the neces­sary evid­ence about involve­ment of bin Laden or any of his asso­ci­ates in the 11 Septem­ber attacks:

In Jalalabad, deputy prime min­is­ter Haji Abdul Kabir — the third most power­ful fig­ure in the rul­ing Taliban regime — told report­ers that the Taliban would require evid­ence that bin Laden was behind the Septem­ber 11 ter­ror­ist attacks in the US, but added: “we would be ready to hand him over to a third country”.

But, in his usual pissing-in-the-wind style, Bush blew this oppor­tun­ity off, vow­ing to con­tinue the bomb­ing, adding:

There’s no need to dis­cuss inno­cence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.

Sub­sequently, Milton Bearden, a former CIA sta­tion chief who over­saw U.S. cov­ert oper­a­tions in Afgh­anistan in the 1980s, is repor­ted1 to have this to say:

We never heard what they were try­ing to say. We had no com­mon lan­guage. Ours was, ‘Give up bin Laden.’ They were say­ing, ‘Do some­thing to help us give him up.’ … I have no doubts they wanted to get rid of him. He was a pain in the neck.’

The Bush regime’s decision to con­tinue the bomb­ing put an end to any pos­sib­il­ity of a poten­tially peace­ful, legal res­ol­u­tion to the events of 11 Septem­ber 2001 and opened up the way for the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Afgh­anistan, Iraq and the threat of inva­sion of Iran, along with the mil­lions who have lost their lives or had them des­troyed as a result.

Not a war we should be fight­ing. Just busi­ness as usual.

Notes:
  1. I had to link to a source other than the Wash­ing­ton Post as the Wash­ing­ton Post appears to have deleted that art­icle from their archive for whatever reason. [↩]
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Death over there, excepting ours, is inconsequential

Jul 12, ’09 9:10 PM

Chris Walker, writ­ing to the The Her­ald (webpage removed):

It’s one of life’s more sav­age iron­ies, but one which has become drear­ily famil­iar, that your head­line “Death toll rises in Afgh­anistan” (Leader, The Her­ald, July 11) means Brit­ish mil­it­ary fatalities.

These are given piquancy because they exceed sim­ilar losses incurred in Iraq. Thus the headline.

As a mat­ter of fact, com­bined, they approx­im­ate the loss of Iraqi civil­ian lives only last week — repeat, week — in Mosul and Bagh­dad. But that’s how war’s rhythms (and its suc­cesses and fail­ures) are cal­ib­rated. That hun­dreds of thou­sands of Iraqis and Afgh­anis have died since 2001 hardly raises an eye­brow, far less engen­der­ing a head­line. But, then, death “over there” was held to be one of the reas­ons for inva­sion, and for stop­ping it “over here”, on the streets of Leeds, Lon­don or Glas­gow. Or so it is said. Thus death over there, except­ing ours, is incon­sequen­tial in our mind­set: even a mil­lion deaths by inva­sion and occupation.

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So what came before September 11?

Jul 8, ’05 8:45 PM

Accord­ing to Jack Straw, in response to George Galloway’s quite reas­on­able point that the cow­ardly attacks on Afgh­anistan and Iraq increased the threat of ter­ror­ist attack in Bri­tain, “People have to remem­ber that 11 Septem­ber was in 2001 before the mil­it­ary action.” This cheap little chunk of self-deluded spin is an attempt to weave the story that the Septem­ber 11 attacks came out of the blue.

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